Tyrian purple: Ancient pigment that was more valuable than gold
bbc.com
bbc.com
Fall of Civilizations 17 - Carthage: Empire of the Phoenecians
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6dbdVhVSat8
This whole channel is absolutely amazing. I watched almost the entire thing over the last 3 months -- 17 episodes of 2 to 4 hours on various civilizational collapses.
There were a bunch I didn't know about at all -- like medieval civilizations in Cambodia, Burma, and Jordan. They were wealthy, and built huge things, and then disappeared.
Also, I have heard of "Carthage" from all those movies like Gladiator ... Somehow it escaped me until my 40's that Carthage was founded by people from what's now Syria, and the city was in what's now Tunisia :) I guess being American I have a fuzzy picture of that side of the world, and what it looked like in ancient times.
I’m also American and living in Europe for the past decade, and having dived into history such as Roman, Carthage, the Celts, … has really made me appreciate the vast history of our species. I can drive down the ride and see a huge castle the was attacked by Hannibal on his quest for Rome.
And my native friends where I live couldn’t care less :(
I hope America can preserve its history for a while so others can enjoy it in 1000 years like we do with Rome.
Well, I wouldn't care for the history of a long dead civilisation either if my own civilisation and culture has been destroyed in the last half millennium by invaders. There are less than 4 million people in 2023.
And America will preserve its history but I don't think it will be seen in a positive light to be enjoyed.
https://fallofcivilizationspodcast.com/2023/10/16/fall-of-ci...
Growing up in Europe Phoenicia and Carthage were covered extensively in school. Interesting why in US schools they don't teach world geography and history.
But I only recently learned about the final fall of Carthage in the second Punic war, when Hannibal had to return to Africa to face the young Roman general Scipio. The war elephants weren’t so veteran and so the Roman’s were able to scare them off as they charged, breaking the Carthaginian line, leading to a rapid routing.
Great battles were described in fairly great detail —
The final (non-metaphorical) Fall happened at the end of the third Punic War about 50 years later.
Just smear a bunch of pigs with flammable grease, set on fire, and send off towards the elephants who will promptly panic.
Super easy, barely an inconvience.
This is why the Congress never fails to add pork to every spending bill, just in case the Romans return.
There is no such thing as an English alphabet. English uses the modern Latin alphabet, as do most European languages, full stop. Some languages make use of diacritics or have one or two (extra) modified letters (e.g. Ł or IJ), but English doesn't use any of that (unless a word is imported).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=lfB9mX5UUNU (Why you should write "J" when writing in Latin)
Add the Minoans to the list of fallen civilizations that extracted purple before the Pheniceans
It reminds me of Graeber's Dawn of Humanity (good book, though I would also say there are parts you can skim, and still get the message. Also I don't take everything at face value, but it's worth thinking about)
He reminds us that there were politically conscious groups of Homo Sapiens living for tens of thousands of years throughout history! They organized their societies in much different ways than ours.
But many of them didn't leave a trace, either because they didn't write stuff down, or because their documents were destroyed by other people who were able to get on ships with weapons and diseases.
(I actually didn't know that the Romans completely destroyed Carthage's documents and libraries before watching the podcast. They wiped them off the face of the Earth, so the only things we know about Carthage are what the Romans said. Also, "Carthage" isn't even what they called their city -- it's what the Romans called it.)
History is really written by the winners of wars, but there are other ways to live
At least accordingly to myth Carthage was colonized from Tyre, which is today in Lebanon.
And a lot of archaeological evidence!
> Carthage was colonized from Tyre, which is today in Lebanon.
It was founded by Phoenicians [0], whose land today largely coincides with modern-day Lebanon, which as a self-governing state is a relatively modern construct (post WW1).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syria_(region)
It includes Lebanon, parts of northern Palestine, South-eastern Turkey, and (northern?) Jordan. And maybe a bit more.
* It included large areas which are outside and to the North of present-day Lebanon, and
* It was still part of "Ottoman Syria": https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottoman_Syria , which was kind of a maximum version of what's described in my previous link
You win the Internet.
The Corvus had much success in battle, but it is thought to have significantly weighed down ships and offset their center of mass. So at one point, the Roman Navy was stuck in a storm and is thought to have lost over 350 naval ships (and 300 cargo ships) and 100k men at once. It is thought that the corvus might have been responsible for making the ships more likely to capsize during this storm, as the Romans stopped using them after this disaster [2].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corvus_(boarding_device)
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roman_withdrawal_from_Africa_(...
I can't imagine how their ennemies must have felt in those instances.
Russians like to call Moscow the third Rome and their leaders don't care about losses.
But if they do win (for the record, I hope they don't), it won't be because they had superior technology. Or superior generals. It won't be because their cause was righteous.
They will have won because they kept piling on with more infantry beyond what anyone would have thought possible.
Denialism's a fucking superpower.
We don't lose lives, we spend money but not enough that we actually feel it, Russia need to concentrate so much on it their ability to act elsewhere is disminished (sure they launch all their triggers/ Houthi, Venezuela, Sub-saharian africa, but it's not 2016 anymore), ...
It's frankly horrible, but every time an ukrainian solider dies to kill two russian soldiers, western countries safety position improves. I'm not saying I agree with that, or think it's good, to be clear. But I think that the west never considered Ukraine in their sphere and the horrors that have happened since 2013 have invariably been in favor of "us" and not russia, and russia is so focused on playing the game the way it was played last century it feels like they missed it.
This is just weird, because Russia is a much weaker country than the US, and many European countries.
Economically, they are tiny. e.g. I just Googled and found this
https://twitter.com/BWJones/status/1568223569947275264?lang=...
It says Russia's economy is smaller than that of California, Texas, and New York. That sounds about right.
(and of course war is mainly an economic contest)
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They are not a threat to the West. The West is a threat to Russia.
Russia is aggressive and violent because they're in a weak position. They were invaded by Napolean, by Germany in WW I, and by Hitler's Germany in WW II (notably, these are all western powers).
Russia lost ~27,000,000 people in World War II, while the US lost ~400,000.
In the meantime, the US has NEVER had a war on its soil.
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The US would not accept missiles in Cuba in the 1960's. Would we accept Chinese missiles in Mexico in 2024?
It's not a surprise that they would not accept NATO weapons in Ukraine.
Obviously I'm not condoning the invasion, but I'd also say that old men in the US are playing with the lives of young Ukrainian men.
If the US wanted to end this war, we could do it today by actually winning it with our weapons. Instead we trickle out the bare minimum of weapons, ensuring the war grinds to a stalemate.
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If I were Zelensky, I wouldn't make myself and my citizens dependent on powers who actually don't want to win the war.
I wouldn't want to be dependent on people like you, who just want to use the lives of my citizens for to gain an inch in an imaginary game that has little consequence for them.
Nothing stops Russia from ceasing warfare and signing a permanent peace (and trade!) agreement with the West. Obviously nobody is invading Russia nor does anyone in Europe have the slightest interest in it. In January 2022 they were still imagining Putin as a partner. They can barely bother to invest in their militaries or Ukraine's even now.
There would never be warfare again at that latitude from the Atlantic to the Pacific - and back again, all the way around the planet. Russians would be far better off, living in peace for generations to come. But Putin wants an empire.
Only if you don't count wars in the US against Britain, Mexico, Spain, Native American nations.
Also, even experience wouldn't necessarily be helpful against the U.S. army in direct combat if it came to that. People sometimes call the U.S. military pampered and oversupplied, but they might forget that, being so often deployed in major operations, it's, aside from being the world's best funded military, also probably one of the world's the most experienced militaries with troops and tactics tested in hard, practical, multifaceted combat.
E.g. Recruiting and equipping a huge army once, but losing it in a battle. Versus building an economic machine around the ability to continually recruit, train, and equip huge armies.
1) Start with children who don't know any better.
2) See #1.
The reason that Russia is enlisting prisoners, is because the MOD needs more people than their peace-time mandatory service contracts are able to provide, but knows that a full draft would be highly unpopular.
Roman recruitment was nothing of the sort. It was not voluntary, it was expected that everyone would participate, and there would be serious consequences for draft-dodgers, both on the level of their local communities, and on a wider social scope.
"Will service improve my personal situation? Enough to be worth it?"
Hence why recruitment correlates with unemployment.
Nations with effective recruitment policies understood this, and typically funded it with things they had in abundance (e.g. land grants, pensions, etc).
Before you sympathize too much with Carthage, bear in mind that their (well documented by contemporary sources even if you account for anti-Carthagian propaganda from some Roman sources) religious practices were distinctly grotesque, involving no shortage of child sacrifice that even included burning children alive. Notable families were also encouraged to do the same to their first sons in times of crisis, but would often buy the children of poor people to go in their place.
I know the Romans really, really disliked the Carthagians, so it must have tainted their view on them in all circumstances, but even then, there are enough sources professing outright disgust about their sacrificial practices to give the complaints some weight. And if Romans of all people are disgusted with how brutal a country's cultural practices are, you can imagine that they probably were pretty damn awful.
Now imagine Carthage won the Punic wars and destroyed Rome, what would we be disgusted with while reading about Roman customs? What would we be considering brutal, awful and barbaric?
It's also generally absurd to think that I must automatically be influenced by some propaganda if I consider plausible the ancient records and evidence of another society's extreme sacrificial practices.
As another comment in this reply thread mentions, (though it mistakes Aztecs with Maya), people spent decades thinking that accounts of mass Aztec child sacrifice were colonial era-biased exaggerations, until mass graves of children were much more recently found showing signs not only of sacrifice but torture in advance (to induce tears for the god Tlaloc among other reasons).
Sometimes historical cultures are just awful in certain ways that have to be mentioned in posterity, even if we can appreciate other aspects of those cultures. This applies to any culture and should.
I'm reminded of how most all the hallmarks we attribute to the Spartans turns out to be literal hearsay of the time (much of it emanating from...yep, times of conflict/rivalry). Although they were apparently intentionally secretive, it's pretty easy to imagine some not-anthropologist merchants passing along gossip which gets taken in by the rival permanent settlements.
Not that Carthage is free from accusation, but I'm reading some historians actually claim Romans found the religious ceremony of sacrifice to be abhorrent, as opposed to the more general infanticide that was recorded throughout the larger region (including Rome) for presumably a more eugenic/pragmatic purpose.
Sometimes dismissing evidence because of perceived bias is simply incorrect.
I also didn't dismiss potential evidence for Carthage's sacrificial culture, of which there's enough to make the accusation, but really, only that.
I don't actually have a horse in the races of dead people, but I do hesitate to perpetuate even ancient culture wars. It's usually just going to make more use of people's tribal desire than their deductive skills, though why people have emotions about ancient, dead societies, I'll never know.
The principal cause for why Rome was so successful at beating up its neighbours was well-executed logistics and a capable bureaucracy.
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[1] Interesting, but non-nonsensical. How would labeling the parts of an already-completed ship meaningfully impact reverse-engineering efforts? It's a ancient ship, not an composite airplane, or a microchip, you can rip it apart, piece-by-piece, without the benefit of labeling.
The older I get, the more I'm convinced he's right. The names of parts helps give some amount of context and purpose to why a thing was done, what it's role is, etc.
This gives a much quicker comprehension to the thing you're trying to understand - consider someone handing you a codebase you've never seen, and a vague description of what it does. Is it easier to understand with well named functions, variables and types? What if the all function names were replaced with f1, f2, ... fn, and variable names were replaced with v1, v2, ... vn, and so on?
What if it wasn't a complete codebase, but only part of it, and had gone through a bit of a scramble (the Carthaginian ship in question had been wrecked as I understand it)? What if you were a brand new programmer (Rome was new to the whole ship thing then...)?
You're absolutely right that it's not strictly necessary to have the labels for reverse engineering, but the labels certainly help... for context it was 8 years from the start of the war until the battle in question, and the fleet was built in just 4 years. At that rate, I find the label thing a plausible contributing factor.
I met a traveller from an antique land,
Who said—“Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. . . . Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;
And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.”"Shelley wrote the poem in friendly competition with his friend and fellow poet Horace Smith (1779–1849), who also wrote a sonnet on the same topic with the same title." https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozymandias
Horace's entry is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ozymandias_(Smith)
In Egypt's sandy silence, all alone,
Stands a gigantic Leg, which far off throws
The only shadow that the Desert knows:—
"I am great OZYMANDIAS," saith the stone,
"The King of Kings; this mighty City shows
The wonders of my hand."— The City's gone,—
Naught but the Leg remaining to disclose
The site of this forgotten Babylon.
We wonder — and some Hunter may express
Wonder like ours, when thro' the wilderness
Where London stood, holding the Wolf in chace,
He meets some fragment huge, and stops to guess
What powerful but unrecorded race
Once dwelt in that annihilated place
Whoa, whoa, whoa...that's a "you" problem, not a "we" problem.
Lots of people in America know about history and geography.
We're glad that you took interest and keep at it, but let's not perpetuate false stereotypes.
Named after India, it was one of the incentives for colonisation and indeed the Great Bengal Famine (which affected 30 million people).
It became one of the most remarkable peasant movements of Indian history against the British. It came to be called the Neel Bidroha or the Indigo Revolt.
The Indigo famine drama script that was created by the Anglican priest James Long and Indian writer Dinabandhu Mitra - Nil Darpan (Indigo Mirror) - was the root cause of the creation of the National Theatre in Kolkata. The British banned the play in England saying it "slandered British women for desiring the Indigo dye".
The National Theatre (and the Indigo play) in Kolkata kickstarted the Indian commercial performing arts industry...eventually culminating in Bollywood.
Though now there are two plants we call cinnamon, and I think the new world mostly produces the other one, which is why Ceylon Cinnamon is a ‘thing’ now.
Pepper was similarly more valuable than gold, but I don’t recall the sordid history on that one.
> In 1998, by means of a lengthy trial and error process, a process for dyeing with Tyrian purple was rediscovered.[37][38] This finding built on reports from the 15th century to the 18th century and explored the biotechnology process behind woad fermentation. It is hypothesized that an alkaline fermenting vat was necessary. An incomplete ancient recipe for Tyrian purple recorded by Pliny the Elder was also consulted. By altering the percentage of sea salt in the dye vat and adding potash, he was able to successfully dye wool a deep purple colour.[39]
So in that regard, the article seems not entirely correct.
> I'd rather animals suffer than humans
Ah yes, the eternal suffering of not having purple clothes. It haunts me every day.
Nevertheless, none of those has the lightfastness and the permanence of the pigment extracted from snails, which were the reasons for its very high value in the antiquity.
After Tyrian purple, the blue dyes from indigo or woad are the next best in lightfastness, and then some of the red dyes. Most natural dyes fade rather quickly, so in antiquity it was usual to dye again the expensive garments from time to time, not only to wash them.
Now it is possible to synthesize the pigments that compose the Tyrian purple, but the process is much more expensive than for the cheap purple synthetic dyes that are commonly used.
(Come to think of it, many of the things we use wealth for today is also visual signalling in some sense.)